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Nearly two hundred professional researchers, scientists, and PhD students from all over the world travelled to Nyborg, Denmark in order to participate in the sixth International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research. This year’s theme was ‘Adaptive Processes in Hearing.’

On August 23-25, scientists in neurocience, audiology, psycology and professionals from the hearing industry met to give lectures, discuss posters and talk about the topic of this year which the organizers from Hearing Systems and the board members had prepared.

Similar to earlier Danavox Symposia, ISAAR focuses on a few major topics of broad interest and highlights current activities in the different disciplines. This time the focus was on different perspectives on adaptive processes in hearing. 31 talks and 56 posters were presented during these three days in Nyborg. There were many differentpresentations, test results andconclusions circulating which bothimpressedand inspiredthe other participants.

Tobias Moser, University of Göttingen Medical Center, Germany held the talk: 'Hearing the Light': Optogenic Stimulation of the Auditory Nerve' and showed how cells can be made genetically light-sensitive to stimulate the auditory nerve.

When hearing fails, speech comprehension can be restored by auditory prostheses. However, sound coding with current prostheses, based on electrical stimulation of the auditory nerves, has limited frequency resolution due to broad current spread. He and his research group aim to improve frequency and intensity resolution of cochlear implant coding by establishing spatially confined optical stimulation of spiral ganglion neurons (SGN’s)

Jaques Grange,University’s School of Psychology Cardiff University, held a talk: Turn an ear to hear'. CI (cochlear implant) users can use head orientation to improve their intelligibility of speech in noisy social settings. Their study showed that cochlear implant listeners in a noisy situation benefit from facing slightly away from the person they are listening to, turning one ear towards the speech. Actually being able to hear just a few decibels more by turning toward the talker can make the whole difference in hearing.

"Never face someone in a conversation"

Laurel Carney

Laurel Carney, Biomedical Engineering & Neuroscience, University of Rochester, USA gave a talk about modeling midbrain responses to simultaneous speech. Through computer modeling it is possible to simulate background noise, different degrees of hearing loss, read the changes and decode the neural information in response to sound fluctuations. This work may be important for the development of hearing aids for listening in background noise.

Caption:”Never face someone in a conversation," Laurel Carney (leftmost) said after attending the talk by Jacques Grange Cardiff University (to her right) 'Turn an ear to hear'. Here with Lars Bramsløw from Eriksholm Research Centre who was very impressed by his presentation and Jeremy Marozeau, DTU Hearing Systems.

The scientists were also fascinated by the talk by Owen Brimijoin from the Scottish Section of the MRC Institute of Hearing, Glasgow "Parametric measurements of natural conversation behavior reveal effects of background noise level on speech, movement and gaze." By using head trackings, it is actually possible to figure out in which direction people will turn their heads.

In the afternoonthere wasa chance to studyeach other'sresearchduring theposter sessions. After each oral presentation there was also the opportunity to ask questions to the scientists.

Jakob Christensen-Dalsgaard was especially impressed by the talk by Tobias Moser 'Hearing the light´.
“It was absolutely spectacular. You can insert a new gene coding for a light sensitive channel into the auditory nerve and use light pulses instead of the electrical stimulation used in CI. The downside is that it requires genetic engineering, but it is a fascinating development ," Jakob Christensen-Dalsgaard said, and Ture Andersen agreed:“It's fascinating if you can do that. Then we are one step further increasing frequency resolution of the stimulation."

Between the many interesting lectures and talks there were opportunities to discuss the topics and network in the break in the nice surroundings at Nyborg Strand. ISAAR is a great opportunity to for young scientists to approach more experienced researchers and vice versa.

Andreu Parades-Gallardo,Hearing Systems DTU, presented "The role of temporal cues on a voluntary stream segregation in cochlear implant users". Results showed that performance increased with rate differences and sequence length, suggesting that coclear implant users can rely on temporal cues to segregate sounds and that this percept builds up over time.Several other researchers expressed their impression of the project and of how many test subjects the research group had managed.

Sébastien Santurette, who has organized the program and Sarah Verhulst from Ghent University, Belgium, who received her PhD at DTU:
“I am very impressed by the organization of this conference” Sarah Verhulst said,
"There are some good discussions and this is one of few occasions where the industry and the basic research come together."

Several researchers from the The Cognitive Control of a Hearing Aid (COCOHA) Horizon 2020 project which takes part in different countries had the had the opportunity to meet and discuss their projects. Here it is (leftmost) Antoine Favre-Félix (DTU /Eriksholm Research Centre,Daniel Wong (Ecole Normale Paris) , Jonatan Marcher-Rørsted and Søren Fuglsang (DTU)

ISAAR International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research, formerly known as Danavox Symposium was founded in 1968. It takes place every second year. The symposium is organized by the Danavox Jubilee Foundation and supported by GN Resound. The foundation is managed by a board of scientific specialists within hearing research, independent of GN ReSound.
Read more and see all abstracts on www.isaar.eu. This year seventeendifferent countries were represented.The next ISAAR Symposium will be held in 2019 in at Hotel Nyborg Strand, Denmark; the topic is still open

About Hearing Systems

Hearing Systems is one of DTU Electrical Engineering's Research Groups. We teach and conduct research into speech and hearing sciences, communication acoustics and audio and auditory signal processing.